The Clearing House (TCH) continues adding financial institutions (FIs) to its real-time payments (RTP) network, as consumers and businesses gain a better understanding of the payment model to leverage B2B, B2C and ”me-to-me” payments.

As of Tuesday, 269 FIs were live on TCH’s RTP network, up from 258 in the second quarter, Cheryl Gurz, RTP product manager at TCH, said during the webinar “Is Your Company Operationally Ready for Real-Time Payments?” hosted by Mercator Advisory group Wednesday.

New York-based TCH, which launched its RTP network in November 2017, completed more than 40 million RTP transactions in Q2 and now reaches up to 61% of checking accounts in the U.S., Gurz said.

“We have over 95,000 businesses in the U.S. that have initiated a payment in the month of May between … B2C and B2B, as we continue to get more education and more individuals having experience with this new payment type,” Gurz said.

The growth in TCH’s RTP network, which allows consumers and businesses to send payments directly between checking accounts, is attributed to it paying close attention to use cases and how people are leveraging the network’s ability to complete instant payments, Gurz said.

The area seeing the most use is TCH’s “wallet” capabilities, Gurz said, noting that clients can move their own money from PayPal, Venmo and gaming or gambling wallets directly into their traditional banking account through a “me-to-me” payment.

The me-to-me payments have “really taken off … and many customers are promoting that you can cash out of their wallets instantly by using real-time payments,” she said.

RTP adoption

Looking ahead, as the adoption of the RTP network continues to grow, other areas of the industry, too, are noticing growth in the new payment space, Sarah Grotta, director of debit and alternative products advisory service at Mercator Advisory Group, said during the webinar.

“Launching a brand new payment rail is not something that happens overnight, but we are in fact forecasting over the next couple of years that the market is really going to be entering a period of steep growth,” she said.